Why I Chose to Set Up My Own Site, Instead of Using Self Publishing Sites

There are many reasons to consider when publishing your own work online.

The main consideration for me is: who will actually own the rights to my work after it is published? However, there are many more reasons to write than intellectual freedom. some of us want to earn money too, whereas some of us will have particular products and services to promote.

All of these things are achievable with your own domain.

You can make revenue by placing ads on your site and there are a wide range of affiliate programmes and ad providers out there. If you have a product or a service to promote, then it will be much more professional if it is promoted by your own website.

You can even set up an online store in relatively little time using website design software. This software comes in all shapes and sizes and also a big price range, so I would always recommend doing some rersearch to make sure you are getting the programme that is right for you.

You will actually own the full rights to any content and will then be able to do as you wish with whatever you write. You will need to take precautions to ensure that your work is backed up and copyrighted to ensure that you wont have it stolen, but this is all very simple to do.

I started my site a few weeks ago, http://www.butnu.co.uk, and already it has had some hits, without me even promoting it. I have barely built the site and am still making a lot of changes, but the traffic is already flowing. I am currently getting 15 or so hits a day, and I havent even set up any search tags (or Meta Tags) yet. This means that all of my traffic is coming from random hits and word of mouth.

You can still network with your site by building relationships with other sites so that they link to you and vice versa.

butnu.co.uk is not there to sell anything, I simply wanted to have a site where I could show everyone my movies and stories, but if you look at the site, you will see how much it has grown in concept.

So building your own website may be a better option for any serious writers out there and there is much to consider.

You will need to acquire some things in order to buid a site:

A domain (eg, www.butnu.co.uk- this is the url your site will occupy)
A host (space for you to store the files for your site on a server)
SSL certificate (optional security benefit preventing your users from being phished etc)

Once you have these things and have built your site, you are ready to truly call yourself "Webmaster".

It is certainly something to consider doing, but will not be right for everyone as running and maintaining the site will take dedication and time.